Widget Designer not working - Sitefinity - Front- & Back-End Development

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Posted by Community Admin on 03-Apr-2014 00:00

I have a custom widget with an image selector. I created the designer with the wizard within VS, assigning the Guid Image field to an Image Selector. This does not work at all. Everytime I add the widget and click edit to open the designer, I get a null reference exception for these controls within the GetScriptDescriptors() method:

descriptor.AddElementProperty("selectButtonWidgetImage", this.SelectButtonWidgetImage.ClientID);

descriptor.AddElementProperty("deselectButtonWidgetImage", this.DeselectButtonWidgetImage.ClientID);

Both SelectButtonWidgetImage and DeselectButtonWidgetImage are null. What is going on with this product? I'm literally pulling my hair out trying to do simple things that should work out of the box. It's just a simple MVC widget with a couple fields.

I've attached an image with the properties exposed. it's kind of hard to see since ctrl+print screen make the menus almost transparent, but you can see the value of the dictionary is null. What is happening here? I need this to work.

Posted by Community Admin on 04-Apr-2014 00:00

Any word on this? I really need to get this working

Posted by Community Admin on 07-Apr-2014 00:00

Hi Ryan,

From the code you have provided us with, I can suggest trying to change the AddElementProperty method to AddComponentProperty one, because this could be the issue, especially if you are using sitefinity or rad control for this field. You can reference the following blog post, which includes adding image editor in the designer of the widget. I hope you will find it helpful.

Regards,
Nikola Zagorchev
Telerik

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Posted by Community Admin on 07-Apr-2014 00:00

First, changing to AddComponentProperty has nothing to do with the issue, which is that the control(SelectButtonWidgetImage) is null.

Second, ofcourse I'm using sitefinity or rad control for this field....it's your own designer wizard.

Third, that blog post is from 2 full versions ago, and uses different types altogether. The ones done in the designer are LinkButton, not ImageField. Is there nothing I can find that is relevant to the current software? A large reason I'm even using sitefinity for this project is because this stuff is supposed to be built in. I'm not interested in building my own designers. The documentation for everything regarding this product is frustratingly sparse to say the least.

Am I wrong to assume that someone inside your team would replicate what I'm doing? It seems like most responses to everyone just points them to years old blog posts.

Part of what makes this product so hard to use and debug myself is that the intellisense is basically non-existent, so I can't even look through object properties to see what my options are.

I'm using Visual Studio 2013. Please make an MVC widget with just one field using Guid as the field. Create the designer with Thunder and use Image Selector as the field type. Then let me know why the designer is not working please.

Posted by Community Admin on 08-Apr-2014 00:00

Hi,

You should first create your MVC widget, add its fields. Then, add the widget designer using Sitefinity Thunder and select the Guid field to be presented in the designer by Image Selector, as shown here.
The auto generated designer is automatically added to your widget and works out of the box.
I have attached a simple widget with a Guid field and using a designer with image selector for the field.

Regards,
Nikola Zagorchev
Telerik

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